


Cacti

by Fniff



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Cancer, Drug Use, Drugs, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Mentions of Cancer, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:55:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24075550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fniff/pseuds/Fniff
Summary: This is the story of how Cindy the SKULL came to Martinaise. This isn't the story of how she came to crash in that coalroom, though; that's another tale entirely. It begins when she runs out of uncles, and it ends next to some cacti.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 17





	Cacti

The old man was dead: he’d finally lost the fight against the cancer in his ass. At the far back corner of a barracks on Rosenkrantz Row, a little girl named Cindy watched the pigs carry him down the stairs. From the bottom, a pig asked Cindy if she had anywhere to go, and she told him to go fuck himself. The pig’s face collapsed its sympathetic bridge into a rolling river of disgust, that mask of cop-disgust pigs wore when confronted with the public’s ire. They told her the city morgue would contact her about ‘arrangements’, but by the time the phone rang she would be gone.

She had a funeral for the old man in a barrel behind the barracks. An autumn wind blew through the poles of the swing set and rattled the rusty chains that held up the seats. First came the bonfire of the vanities. His cartons of Astras, his pornography collection, but not the pyrholidon he got from that guy on Boogie Street, the Mazov manifesto overdue from Jamrock Library, or his ass cancer drugs. When all save the essentials turned into smoke, she emptied a cardboard box of photographs into the carcinogenic fire, throwing the box into a ditch when it caught alight. The black and white photographs melted into a lump of carbon wreathed in flames, and Cindy watched with no small wonder. He would sit down with Cindy and these photographs, cloud the apartment in cigarette smoke, then tell Cindy who was her parents, and her cousins. They were more his photographs than they were her family.

There was ✤40 earmarked in an envelope for rent and groceries in the roll-top desk, but Cindy wasn’t going to stick around in North Jamrock, so she decided it could be better spent. Beside the envelope was the prescription for his ass cancer drugs. She went around to the mom and pop pharmacy down the corner and spent the cash stockpiling the stuff. As soon as she received her change, something sank in her chest. He didn’t mind her taking them - the cancer was going to kill him either way - but it should have started working by now. The other girls in the row were already hitting the bass notes of puberty, and Cindy kept getting paranoid that she was sprouting a mustache. She found the other kids disgusting, and had a suspicion that none of them would mind if they woke up as boys, same way they wouldn’t mind if the Coalition aerostatics pounded Revachol into dust overnight. It pissed her off. Nobody in this city had a spine like Cindy.

Stopping at the door before she left, she took a look over the flat. The page three pin-ups on the wall from old newspapers, the lesbian paperbacks written by guys with names like ‘Darnell Hamby’, the packet of condoms expiring in the rolltop desk: it wasn’t a place for a child, but Cindy was too young or too old wherever she went. She tried to spare a thought for the old man, but theirs wasn’t a relationship that you spared thoughts for. They were planets in orbit, a star and a comet. Over time the star collapsed, and the comet moved on: physics.

Rozenkrantz Row sat at the bottom of a psychotic hill that twisted the urban into something out of a dream. It was like some sort of a myth climbing up that hill, and her calves ached when she hit the top of it. She looked at the half-collapsed townhouse, which she imagined was the home of a vampire. Over that townhouse was a half-view of the city below, where she could see the burn-out quarter stain itself across the land, and the tip of a crane somewhere in the industrial harbour. It crossed her mind that the SKULLS would never refuse a chance to welcome back a prodigal daughter. But wasn’t there an aunt in Martinaise? Maybe a cousin, twice removed? Whatever, what was the point of having aunts and uncles like the old man if you didn’t barge into their lives without warning? It was enough to get Cindy moving.

There’s stories born from poverty. Like when you make your own paint out of fuel stolen from cop cars, or hop on the back of the Jamrock tram and watch the sparks fly beneath your feet. However, the Jamrock tram has been out of service since the 40s. That’s when reality comes in. When you’re poor and you need to get across the city, sometimes all you can do is walk. Your heels ache. Your soles come loose. The rain comes in a miserable fog. There is no story in this walking. What the last step told you differs not from the next step you will take.

Martinaise bleeds in with the the loss of services. The streets crack like lava gone off. Mailboxes lie vandalized or not there at all. Torn wires hang from telegraph poles, wagging in the wind. The buildings stop huddling together for warmth and grow distant from one another. They're older and scarred by bulletholes. It's Martinaise when the potholes stop being potholes and become bomb craters. Someone has painted one red, like a clit in one of the old man's magazines. The sea breeze makes her eyes sting, and that's how you know it's Martinaise for real. The earth beneath feels unsteady, drunk. A little bridge made from planks covering mortar damage shows the rushing sea between planks. Tall buildings decapitated by aerostatic fire show no recognition to Cindy. She now knows she does not have an aunt out in Martinaise, and it's hard to imagine anyone having an aunt out here.

It was evening by the time she arrived, and it was too late to walk back. She needed a home, but Martinaise didn't have homes as much as it did imminent disasters. Cindy walked the coast an hour looking for shelter, but all the good spots outside a creepy little village were claimed by little gangs of alcoholic dads splitting centims between themselves for the biggest bottle with the smallest price-tag. There was this building on a boardwalk that seemed promising, but the doors were boarded and Cindy snapped a hairpin trying to pick the window open. The sun set, and the sky turned that wyrd crimson that turned the world pink. With no good spots, Cindy trawled the so-so spots back across the waterlock. The houses with no roofs and the shelter with no walls, the sheds and the wrecks. Behind a hostel there was a greenhouse, and the door was open, so she took it.

Inside pushed her back with a wave of heat. The heat smelt of vegetables rotting, and something chemical. Inside was dark as the sun had set behind the buildings that enclosed the greenhouse and its yard, and just by stepping in Cindy knocked down two rakes and a hoe. Growing in pots were a range of succulents, air plants, and desert flowers. Why, who knew, maybe it was to sell to gardening centers or for the sake of growing the spiky bastards. Cindy fumbled her way through the greenhouse until she groped a chair, a big wingback stained coal by the compost bag left sitting in the seat. The artist knocked the bag off, spilling it to the floor, then sat in its place. 

The chair was comfortable enough to sleep in, Cindy decided, and so she tried sleeping in it. This was a mistake: the chair would have been sleepable if it was on its side, but Cindy could not sleep with her spine upright. The evening had gone from red to deepest black, and despite the slithering heat of this place Cindy knew the air would be biting cold outside. Sleep would never come and there was nothing to look at in the dark, so Cindy spent time imagining snakes. Snakes never failed to hold Cindy's attention. Adders, constrictors, rattlers, any snakes really. She saw Revachol as a snake, because Le Calliou had a serpentine bend to it, but all this did was make her want to paint, or read a book about snakes like she had at her penultimate aunt's house. The aunt with the mustache. The aunt with the six overbred dogs. The aunt who kept bathing her at two hour intervals. With that thought, Cindy decided she wanted out of consciousness, and so dug a little tub of joy from the bottom of her bag.

It tasted purple. Not like a purple berry, or a purple sweet, it tasted *of purple*. She looked around the room and waited for it to get more interesting. It stayed the same level of dark. Whether the pyrholidon had kicked in or if she was worrying about whether or not it had kicked in proved unknown. It got Cindy to wondering if the main effect pyrholidon had was making you wonder if it had kicked in. She could see some liquidator sitting in a rathole, waiting for the walls to shiver. Looking at them was miserable, their gaunt face twitching with anticipation. They blinked, then looked to Cindy, and offered her a cigarette. At last the pyrholidon had kicked in.

She tried to take the cigarette, but she didn’t have hands any more. The liquidator’s face was wrinkled, and boiled. Then the face loomed large. It didn’t grow larger, and she didn’t move closer, it was like she was a camera and she was zooming in. The boils became mountains, the wrinkles became canyons, the twitches became earthquivers, and the liquidator’s face was now a view from above. Cindy didn’t have hands anymore because she was a bird, flying high over a skin-colored desert. 

Cindy shut her eyes tight, then opened them as wide as she could. Overlaid over the shades of the greenhouse was the desert, like a projection. Her jaw went slack as the patterns of the sand moved across the ceiling. She reached out a hand and caught the pattern, and it was a mist that wrapped around her fist. The mist felt like a sandstorm, and faintly Cindy could hear the wind. Without thinking about it she breathed in, and the sand-colored fog went down her throat. She coughed, and a flowering cactus emerged from between her lips. 

The cactus grew to be the length of a needle and the width of an ocean. Then the two properties switched places so fast, the cactus warped every second. It became like a whirlpool. Cindy reached in and, ignoring the spikes, plucked from the end of the cactus its flower. She put it in her hair. The flower took root deep into her cranium cap and down into her brainstem, and it tapped her language centers to say ‘look beyond this skull prison’, and Cindy (coincidence had it) was in exactly the mood to do that.

She looked outside her head and saw a vision of herself. She was older, grey in her thinning hair, the flower a dark defiant red against it. Cindy said, “Is this a joke?” and old Cindy said “Kid, it's all a joke,” and Cindy said “I’m not a joke, to hell with you!” and old Cindy said “Yeah, you’re a joke right now, but not forever, never forever,” and Cindy said “You’re lying,” and old Cindy said, “Look up," and Cindy did so, and old Cindy asked what she saw, and Cindy said "The aerostatics," and old Cindy said "Beyond them, higher," and Cindy said "The clouds," and old Cindy said "Beyond them, higher", and Cindy said "The moon?" and old Cindy said "Beyond them, higher," and Cindy said "What do you want me to see? The stars?" and old Cindy said "Beyond them, higher," and Cindy cried "I don't know what you want me to see, I can't see behind the stars, nobody has, nobody ever will, we're all going to die on this broken piece of garbage and there's nothing we can do," and Old Cindy said with absolute certainty "You will see it, Cindy, and you already saw it: before you were born."

With that truth, the pyrholidon rush vanished, and all that was left in that cramped little room was a crowning sense of revelation. All that came after was a hot flush and a brain full of troubling contradictions, the misfirings of an artistic mind. The night passed, and with the dawn came light. In the sun streaming into the greenhouse, her skin felt smoother, and there was the promise of something in Cindy's chest. Outside the world seemed brighter, coming back to life as it settled in for winter. She traced the shattered streets. For a new life, for a new light, for a new home. On the seafront, watching the ocean lap against the stone under her feet, Cindy decided that she was going to grow old.

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to my friend Delta for reading + critiquing this fic.  
> Hope you, the reader, enjoyed it.


End file.
